Culinary Dropout

Plenty of elbow room and a great friendly atmosphere at Culinary Dropout. Erin brought me here for my b-day dinner and I had a great time!  Our server had a really nice color gradient on his beard and sat down beside Erin on the bench as if to say "Phew, my dogs are barking!" -- we all had a chuckle about that. Other servers had mohawks or novel skirt-short combos. We speculated that they each had a "thing".

We got these salt-babies to kick things off. Honestly, I would be content just ordering two baskets of these and a couple cocktails. So good! We debated a bit about wether larger salt crystals would be preferable -- I think I came down on the side that they *would*... but I'm a salt fiend. The pretzel itself was pillowy perfection. 

Pillowy pretzels and cheese

Start with a classic: an old fashioned. Really good! not as good as the one at Bartlett's but the pretzel/drink combination here was awesome.

A classic start with an old fashioned

Entreeeeeesssss! Yeah!

Here's Erin's. Looks great, right? WRONG. She ordered no coleslaw and chicken noodle soup, not chicken tortilla. This flub-up coincided with a long absence of our server, so I ended up getting up and finding him myself. As annoying as it was, this kind of thing can happen anywhere so I won't dock them hard for it -- also when the sandwich *did* come it was delicious, so there's that. 

Turkey pastrami with soup

My Italian Grinder. The fries were EXCELLENT. Crispy, oily, couldn't stop eating. The grinder itself was kinda meh. You want some textural or flavor excitement in a sandwich like this -- often supplied by banana/bell peppers, olives, even a crunchier bread -- but this guys was super uniform. Nothing to write home about. While I'm at it, if you want a kick-ass Italian sandwich, hit up Snarf's on Red River. They do it right. Thanks, Snarf's! *WINK*!

Italian Grinder.

And lest I forget, my last cocktail was also whisky based, the 'Smashed Irishman'.  Soooo smooth. Honey, Guinness reduction? Will order again.

"Smashed Irishman" made with whiskey

I had a great time here, mostly 'cause I was in a good relaxed mood, and the atmostphere is fun, and the company was so pleasant (Erin was super chill about the order being wrong). I'd love to go back and try some of the other items on the menu.  Three Aemon Stars for Culinary Dropout!